Category Archives: Semiconductors

Scientists at Rice University and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have discovered a method to make atomically flat gallium that shows promise for nanoscale electronics.

The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and colleagues in India created two-dimensional gallenene, a thin film of conductive material that is to gallium what graphene is to carbon.

Extracted into a two-dimensional form, the novel material appears to have an affinity for binding with semiconductors like silicon and could make an efficient metal contact in two-dimensional electronic devices, the researchers said.

The new material was introduced in Science Advances.

Gallium is a metal with a low melting point; unlike graphene and many other 2-D structures, it cannot yet be grown with vapor phase deposition methods. Moreover, gallium also has a tendency to oxidize quickly. And while early samples of graphene were removed from graphite with adhesive tape, the bonds between gallium layers are too strong for such a simple approach.

So the Rice team led by co-authors Vidya Kochat, a former postdoctoral researcher at Rice, and Atanu Samanta, a student at the Indian Institute of Science, used heat instead of force.

Rather than a bottom-up approach, the researchers worked their way down from bulk gallium by heating it to 29.7 degrees Celsius (about 85 degrees Fahrenheit), just below the element’s melting point. That was enough to drip gallium onto a glass slide. As a drop cooled just a bit, the researchers pressed a flat piece of silicon dioxide on top to lift just a few flat layers of gallenene.

They successfully exfoliated gallenene onto other substrates, including gallium nitride, gallium arsenide, silicone and nickel. That allowed them to confirm that particular gallenene-substrate combinations have different electronic properties and to suggest that these properties can be tuned for applications.

“The current work utilizes the weak interfaces of solids and liquids to separate thin 2-D sheets of gallium,” said Chandra Sekhar Tiwary, principal investigator on the project he completed at Rice before becoming an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Gandhinagar, India. “The same method can be explored for other metals and compounds with low melting points.”

Gallenene’s plasmonic and other properties are being investigated, according to Ajayan. “Near 2-D metals are difficult to extract, since these are mostly high-strength, nonlayered structures, so gallenene is an exception that could bridge the need for metals in the 2-D world,” he said.

People are growing increasingly dependent on their mobile phones, tablets and other portable devices that help them navigate daily life. But these gadgets are prone to failure, often caused by small defects in their complex electronics, which can result from regular use. Now, a paper in today’s Nature Electronics details an innovation from researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York that provides robust protection against circuitry damage that affects signal transmission.

The breakthrough was made in the lab of Andrea Alù, director of the ASRC’s Photonics Initiative. Alù and his colleagues from The City College of New York, University of Texas at Austin and Tel Aviv University were inspired by the seminal work of three British researchers who won the 2016 Noble Prize in Physics for their work, which teased out that particular properties of matter (such as electrical conductivity) can be preserved in certain materials despite continuous changes in the matter’s form or shape. This concept is associated with topology–a branch of mathematics that studies the properties of space that are preserved under continuous deformations.

“In the past few years there has been a strong interest in translating this concept of matter topology from material science to light propagation,” said Alù. “We achieved two goals with this project: First, we showed that we can use the science of topology to facilitate robust electromagnetic-wave propagation in electronics and circuit components. Second, we showed that the inherent robustness associated with these topological phenomena can be self-induced by the signal traveling in the circuit, and that we can achieve this robustness using suitably tailored nonlinearities in circuit arrays.”

To achieve their goals, the team used nonlinear resonators to mold a band-diagram of the circuit array. The array was designed so that a change in signal intensity could induce a change in the band diagram’s topology. For low signal intensities, the electronic circuit was designed to support a trivial topology, and therefore provide no protection from defects. In this case, as defects were introduced into the array, the signal transmission and the functionality of the circuit were negatively affected.

As the voltage was increased beyond a specific threshold, however, the band-diagram’s topology was automatically modified, and the signal transmission was not impeded by arbitrary defects introduced across the circuit array. This provided direct evidence of a topological transition in the circuitry that translated into a self-induced robustness against defects and disorder.

“As soon as we applied the higher-voltage signal, the system reconfigured itself, inducing a topology that propagated across the entire chain of resonators allowing the signal to transmit without any problem,” said A. Khanikaev, professor at The City College of New York and co-author in the study. “Because the system is nonlinear, it’s able to undergo an unusual transition that makes signal transmission robust even when there are defects or damage to the circuitry.”

“These ideas open up exciting opportunities for inherently robust electronics and show how complex concepts in mathematics, like the one of topology, can have real-life impact on common electronic devices,” said Yakir Hadad, lead author and former postdoc in Alù’s group, currently a professor at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. “Similar ideas can be applied to nonlinear optical circuits and extended to two and three-dimensional nonlinear metamaterials.”

The latest update to the SEMI World Fab Forecast report, published on February 28, 2018, reveals fab equipment spending will increase at 5 percent in 2019 for a remarkable fourth consecutive year of growth as shown in figure 1. China is expected to be the main driver of fab equipment spending growth in 2018 and 2019 absent a major change in its plans. The industry had not seen three consecutive years of growth since the mid-1990s.

Figure 1

Figure 1

SEMI predicts Samsung will lead in fab equipment spending both in 2018 and 2019, with Samsung investing less each year than in 2017.  By contrast, China will dramatically increase year-over-year fab equipment spending by 57 percent in 2018 and 60 percent in 2019 to support fab projects from both multinationals and domestic companies. The China spending surge is forecast to accelerate it past Korea as the top spending region in 2019.

After record investments in 2017, Korea fab equipment spending will decline 9 percent, to US$18 billion, in 2018 and an additional 14 percent, to US$16 billion, in 2019. However both years will outpace pre-2017 spending levels for the region. Fab equipment spending in Taiwan, the third-largest region for fab investments, will fall 10 percent to about US$10 billion in 2018, but is forecast to rebound 15 percent to over US$11 billion in 2019. (Details about other regions’ spending trends are available in SEMI’s latest World Fab Forecast.)

As expected, China’s fab equipment spending is increasing as projects shift to equipment fabs constructed earlier in this cycle.  The record 26 volume fabs that started construction in China in 2017 will begin equipping this year and next.  See figure 2.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Non-Chinese companies account for the largest share of fab equipment investment in China. However, Chinese-owned companies are expected to ramp up fabs in 2019, increasing their share of spending in China from 33 percent in 2017 to 45 percent in 2019.

Product Sector Spending

3D NAND will lead product sector spending, growing 3 percent each in 2018 and 2019, to US$16 billion and US$17 billion, respectively. DRAM will see robust growth of 26 percent in 2018, to US$14 billion, but is expected to decline 14 percent to US$12 billion in 2019.  Foundries will increase equipment spending by 2 percent to US$17 billion in 2018 and by 26 percent to US$22 billion in 2019, primarily to support 7nm investments and ramp of new capacity.

Most people have felt that sting from grabbing a doorknob after walking across a carpet or seen how a balloon will stick to a fuzzy surface after a few moments of vigorous rubbing.

While the effects of static electricity have been fascinating casual observers and scientists for millennia, certain aspects of how the electricity is generated and stored on surfaces have remained a mystery.

Now, researchers have discovered more details about the way certain materials hold a charge even after two surfaces separate, information that could help improve devices that leverage such energy as a power source.

“We’ve known that energy generated in contact electrification is readily retained by the material as electrostatic charges for hours at room temperature,” said Zhong Lin Wang, Regents’ Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Our research showed that there’s a potential barrier at the surface that prevents the charges generated from flowing back to the solid where they were from or escaping from the surface after the contacting.”

Georgia Tech professor Zhong Lin Wang poses with an array of 1,000 LED lights that can be illuminated by power produced by the force of a shoe striking a triboelectric generator placed on the floor. (Credit: Rob Felt, Georgia Tech).

Georgia Tech professor Zhong Lin Wang poses with an array of 1,000 LED lights that can be illuminated by power produced by the force of a shoe striking a triboelectric generator placed on the floor. (Credit: Rob Felt, Georgia Tech).

In their research, which was reported in March in the Advanced Materials, the researchers found that electron transfer is the dominant process for contact electrification between two inorganic solids and explains some of the characteristics already observed about static electricity.

“There has been some debate around contact electrification – namely, whether the charge transfer occurs through electrons or ions and why the charges retain on the surface without a quick dissipation,” Wang said.

It’s been eight years since Wang’s team first published research on triboelectric nanogenerators, which employ materials that create an electric charge when in motion and could be designed to harvest energy from a variety of sources such as wind, ocean currents or sound vibrations.

“Previously we just used trial and error to maximize this effect,” Wang said. “But with this new information, we can design materials that have better performance for power conversion.”

The researchers developed a method using a nanoscale triboelectric nanogenerator – composed of layers either of titanium and aluminum oxide or titanium and silicone dioxide – to help quantify the amount of charge accumulating on surfaces during moments of friction.

The method was capable of tracking the accumulated charges in real time and worked over a wide range of temperatures, including very high ones. The data from the study indicated that the characteristics of the triboelectric effect, namely, how electrons flowed across barriers, were consistent with the electron thermionic emission theory.

By designing triboelectric nanogenerators that could withstanding testing at high temperatures, the researchers also found that temperature played a major role in the triboelectric effect.

“We never realized it was a temperature dependent phenomenon,” Wang said. “But we found that when the temperature reaches about 300 Celsius, the triboelectric transfer almost disappears.”

The researchers tested the ability for surfaces to maintain a charge at temperatures ranging from about 80 degrees Celsius to 300 degrees Celsius. Based on their data, the researchers proposed a mechanism for explaining the physics process in triboelectrification effect.

“As the temperature rises, the energy fluctuations of electrons become larger and larger,” the researchers wrote. “Thus, it is easier for electrons to hop out of the potential well, and they either go back to the material where they came from or emit into air.”

SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions, a subsidiary of SCREEN Holdings Co., Ltd (TSE: 7735), with strong semiconductor equipment sales and service bases in Japan, and Axcelis Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: ACLS), a supplier of innovative, high-productivity solutions for the semiconductor industry, today announced a strategic agreement for distribution and support of Axcelis’ complete Purion ion implant product line in Japan. Under the agreement, the companies will establish a training and demonstration facility at SCREEN’s Process Technology Center in Hikone, Japan, as well as initiate a technical collaboration focused on developing advanced process technology for emerging implant, thermal processing and wafer cleaning applications.

Tadahiro Suhara, representative director president of SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions, commented, “We are very excited to introduce the Purion platform’s advanced ion implant technology to our Japanese customers, as well as the opportunity to leverage our combined strengths to develop next generation thermal processing capabilities through our technical collaboration. This agreement will allow us to continue to offer our customers a diversity of solutions to meet our customers’ evolving technological needs.”

Mary Puma, president and CEO of Axcelis Technologies, said, “We’re very pleased to announce our partnership with SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions, a company widely recognized for superior technology and customer satisfaction. It will enable us to bring our Purion product line to the Japan market, and provide us with strong opportunities for new customer penetrations and market share gains.”

Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced that Dr. Paul E. Jacobs will no longer serve as Executive Chairman of the Qualcomm Board of Directors. Dr. Jacobs will continue to serve on the Qualcomm Board, but will no longer serve in an executive management capacity. The Board has discontinued the role of Executive Chairman, which was established in 2014 as part of a leadership transition plan, based on its belief that an independent Chairman is now more appropriate for Qualcomm. The Board has named Jeffrey W. Henderson, an independent Qualcomm director since 2016, to serve as Non-Executive Chairman.

Tom Horton, Lead Director, said, “The Board is committed to the principles of strong corporate governance and believes that having an independent director as Chairman at this important juncture in Qualcomm’s history is in the best interest of the Company and our stockholders. We are unanimous in our view that Jeff is the ideal choice for this role based on his deep financial, operational, and international experience as well as his strong stockholder orientation. We are focused on maximizing stockholder value, and will consider all options to achieve that objective, as we seek to move Qualcomm forward by closing the acquisition of NXP, strengthening our licensing business, and capitalizing on the enormous 5G opportunity before us.”

Mr. Horton continued, “On behalf of the entire Board, I want to thank Paul for his tireless dedication to Qualcomm over many years. Paul is a technology visionary whose ideas and inventions have contributed significantly to the growth of both the Company and the industry.  Paul has led the development of generations of semiconductors that have fueled smart phones and the worldwide wireless revolution of the past 30 years. His deep expertise, coupled with a focus on innovation, have made Qualcomm a leader in critical technologies and positioned us at the forefront of the industry. We are grateful to have Paul’s continued contributions as a member of the Board.  His extensive knowledge of our business, products, strategic relationships and opportunities, as well as the rapidly evolving technologies and competitive environment in our industry, are invaluable to our Board.”

About Paul Jacobs

Dr. Jacobs has served as Chairman of the Board of Qualcomm since 2009, as Executive Chairman since 2014 and as a director since 2005. He served as Chief Executive Officer from 2005 to 2014, Group President of Qualcomm Wireless & Internet from 2001 to 2005, and as an executive vice president from 2000 to 2005. Dr. Jacobs serves on the Board of Directors for FIRST(R), OneWeb, Light and Dropbox. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science, an M.S. degree in electrical engineering, and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.  Dr. Jacobs was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017.

About Jeffrey Henderson

Mr. Henderson has deep financial, operational, and international experience at major corporations.  He served as Chief Financial Officer of Cardinal Health Inc. from 2005 to 2014. Prior to joining Cardinal Health, Mr. Henderson held management positions at Eli Lilly and General Motors, including serving as President and General Manager of Eli Lilly Canada, Controller and Treasurer of Eli Lilly Inc., and in management positions with General Motors in Great Britain, Singapore, Canada and the U.S.  He is currently an Advisory Director to Berkshire Partners LLC, a private equity firm. He is also a director of Halozyme Therapeutics, Inc. and FibroGen, Inc. Mr. Henderson holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Kettering University and an M.B.A. degree from Harvard Business School.

By Emmy Yi

The solar energy sector shined in a global renewable energy market that maintained steady growth last year despite the United States’ shocking withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Solar panel costs dropped to an all-time low, driving global demand that surpassed the 100GW mark for the first time on the strength of standout annual 26 percent growth.

Taiwan has vigorously pursued a transition to renewable energy since 2016. Most notably, Taiwan is phasing out nuclear power as it increases its reliance on climate-friendly energy sources and seeks more foreign investment. The hope is also to boost economic growth and create more jobs.

With its limited land space, the region is fertile ground for rooftop photovoltaic system (PV) systems. In 2016, the Taiwan government set out on an ambitious plan to achieve 3,000MW of installed capacity by 2020 – enough to supply electricity for 1 million households while improving air quality, help spruce up the urban landscape and generate jobs.

The SEMI Taiwan Energy Group fully backs the government renewable-energy policy. Earlier this year, the group gathered more than 200 industry professionals and government officials to explore challenges and opportunities in deploying more rooftop PV systems. Here are some key takeaways:

Infrastructure Reliability Key to High Return on Investment

Size, reliability and safety are paramount in rooftop PV system design. To make the best use of space, reduce the cost per kWh, and ensure a long-term, stable supply of electric energy, the PC modules must be:

  • Compact to fit within limited rooftop space
  • Robust to endure extreme temperatures over long periods; resist fire, salt and water damage; and ensure safe, reliable operation

Financial Institutions Play an Important Role

In response to the government energy policy, domestic financial institutions have funded select projects or issued bonds and derivative products to support the development of Taiwan’s renewables industry. A key part of these efforts is to evaluate risks in areas such as system module safety, maturity of technologies and designs, energy-generating efficiency and maintenance costs.

A Truly Green Industry: Circular Economy

Energy storage systems are maturing rapidly to support expanding markets for renewable energy products. The market for home renewable energy systems is growing, fueled in part by low prices, and the adoption of electric vehicles continues to rise as advances in energy storage technology drive down costs and enable longer ranges. At the current pace of technological development, the world could be using 100 percent renewable energy to achieve the goal of zero emission by 2025. However, to achieve a truly pollution-free environment, a circular economy – marked by the regeneration and reuse of resources – must be established.

For its part, the SEMI Taiwan Energy Group this year will transform the 11-year-old PV Taiwan exhibition into Energy Taiwan, Taiwan’s largest international platform for facilitating communication and collaboration of the entire renewable energy ecosystem. Exhibition themes will range from solar energy, wind energy, hydrogen energy and fuel cells to green transportation, smart energy storage and green finance. The event reflects the consolidation of the SEMI Taiwan Energy Group’s growing resources and its commitment to a circular economy free of fossil fuels.

Originally published on the SEMI blog.

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) today announced a collaboration with Samsung Foundry to develop DesignWare Foundation IP for Samsung’s 8 nanometer (nm) Low Power Plus (8LPP) FinFET process technology. Providing DesignWare Logic Library and Embedded Memory IP on Samsung’s latest process technology enables designers to take advantage of a reduction in power and area compared to Samsung’s 10LPP process. The DesignWare Foundation IP will be developed to meet strict automotive-grade requirements, enabling designers to accelerate ISO 26262 and AEC-Q100 qualifications of their advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and infotainment system-on-chips (SoCs). The DesignWare Logic Library and Embedded Memory IP will be available from Synopsys through the Foundry-Sponsored IP Program for the Samsung 8LPP process, enabling qualified customers to license the IP at no cost. The collaboration extends Synopsys’ and Samsung’s long history of working together to provide silicon-proven IP that helps designers meet their performance, power, and area requirements for a wide range of applications including mobile, automotive, and cloud computing.

“Samsung’s collaboration with Synopsys over the last decade has enabled first-pass silicon success for billions of ICs in mobile and consumer applications,” said Jongwook Kye, vice president of Design Enablement at Samsung Electronics. “As designs get more complex and migrate to smaller FinFET processes, Samsung’s advanced 8LPP process with Synopsys’ high-quality Foundation IP solutions will enable designers to differentiate their products for mobile, cryptocurrency and network/server applications, accelerate project schedules, and quickly ramp into volume production.”

“Samsung and Synopsys share a long and successful history of providing designers with silicon-proven DesignWare IP on Samsung’s processes ranging from 180 to 10 nanometer,” said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for IP at Synopsys. “As the leading provider of physical IP with more than 100 test chip tapeouts on FinFET processes, Synopsys continues to make significant investments in developing IP to help designers take advantage of Samsung’s latest process technologies, reduce risk and speed development of their SoCs.”

Semiconductors–a class of materials that can function as both electrical conductor and insulator, depending on the circumstances–are an essential technology for all modern electronic innovations.

Silicon has long been the most famous semiconductor, but in recent years researchers have studied a wider range of materials, including molecules that can be tailored to serve specific electronic needs.

Perhaps appropriately, one of the most cutting-edge electronics–supercomputers–are indispensable research tools for studying complex semiconducting materials at a fundamental level.

Recently, a team of scientists at TU Dresden used the SuperMUC supercomputer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre to refine its method for studying organic semiconductors.

Illustration of a doped organic semiconductor based on fullerene C60 molecules (green). The benzimidazoline dopant (purple) donates an electron to the C60 molecules in its surrounding (dark green). These electrons can then propagate through the semiconductor material (light green). Credit: S. Hutsch/F. Ortmann, TU Dresden

Illustration of a doped organic semiconductor based on fullerene C60 molecules (green). The benzimidazoline dopant (purple) donates an electron to the C60 molecules in its surrounding (dark green). These electrons can then propagate through the semiconductor material (light green). Credit: S. Hutsch/F. Ortmann, TU Dresden

Specifically, the team uses an approach called semiconductor doping, a process in which impurities are intentionally introduced into a material to give it specific semiconducting properties. It recently published its results in Nature Materials.

“New kinds of semiconductors, organic semiconductors, are starting to get used in new device concepts,” said team leader Dr. Frank Ortmann. “Some of these are already on the market, but some are still limited by their inefficiency. We are researching doping mechanisms–a key technology for tuning semiconductors’ properties–to understand these semiconductors’ limitations and respective efficiencies.”

Quantum impurities

When someone changes a material’s physical properties, he or she also changes its electronic properties and, therefore, the role it can play in electronic devices. Small changes in material makeup can lead to big changes in a material’s characteristics–in certain cases one slight atomic alteration can lead to a 1000-fold change in electrical conductivity.

While changes in material properties may be big, the underlying forces–exerting themselves on atoms and molecules and governing their interactions–are generally weak and short-range (meaning the molecules and the atoms of which they are composed must be close together). To understand changes in properties, therefore, researchers have to accurately compute atomic and molecular interactions as well as the densities of electrons and how they are transferred among molecules.

Introducing specific atoms or molecules to a material can change its conducting properties on a hyperlocal level. This allows a transistor made from doped material to serve a variety of roles in electronics, including routing currents to perform operations based on complex circuits or amplifying current to help produce sound in a guitar amplifier or radio.

Quantum laws govern interatomic and intermolecular interactions, in essence holding material together, and, in turn, structuring the world as we know it. In the team’s work, these complex interactions need to be calculated for individual atomic interactions, including interactions among semiconductor “host” molecules and dopant molecules on a larger scale.

The team uses density functional theory (DFT)–a computational method that can model electronic densities and properties during a chemical interaction–to efficiently predict the variety of complex interactions. It then collaborates with experimentalists from TU Dresden and the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan to compare its simulations to spectroscopy experiments.

“Electrical conductivity can come from many dopants and is a property that emerges on a much larger length scale than just interatomic forces,” Ortmann said. “Simulating this process needs more sophisticated transport models, which can only be implemented on high-performance computing (HPC) architectures.”

Goal!

To test its computational approach, the team simulated materials that already had good experimental datasets as well as industrial applications. The researchers first focused on C60, also known as Buckminsterfullerene.

Buckminsterfullerene is used in several applications, including solar cells. The molecule’s structure is very similar to that of a soccer ball–a spherical arrangement of carbon atoms arranged in pentagonal and hexagonal patterns the size of less than one nanometer. In addition, the researches simulated zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc), another molecule that is used in photovoltaics, but unlike C60, has a flat shape and contains a metallic atom (zinc).

As its dopant the team first used a well-studied molecule called 2-Cyc-DMBI (2-cyclohexyl-dimethylbenzimidazoline). 2-Cyc-DMBI is considered an n-dopant, meaning that it can provide its surplus electrons to the semiconductor to increase its conductivity. N-dopants are relatively rare, as few molecules are “willing” to give away an electron. In most cases, molecules that do so become unstable and degrade during chemical reactions, which in this context can lead to an electronic device failure. 2-Cyc-DMBI dopants are the exception, because they can be sufficiently weakly attractive for electrons–allowing them to move over long distances–while also remaining stable after donating them.

The team got good agreement between its simulations and experimental observations of the same molecule-dopant interactions. This indicates that they can rely on simulation to guide predictions as they relate to the doping process of semiconductors. They are now working on more complex molecules and dopants using the same methods.

Despite these advances, the team recognizes that next-generation supercomputers such as SuperMUC-NG–announced in December 2017 and set to be installed in 2018–will help the researchers expand the scope of their simulations, leading to ever bigger efficiency gains in a variety of electronic applications.

“We need to push the accuracy of our simulations to the maximum,” Ortmann said. “This would help us extend the range of applicability and allow us to more precisely simulate a broader set of materials or larger systems of more atoms.”

Ortmann also noted that while current-generation systems allowed the team to gain insights in specific situations and prove its concept, there is still room to get better. “We are often limited by system memory or CPU power,” he said. “The system size and simulation’s accuracy are essentially competing for computing power, which is why it is important to have access to better supercomputers. Supercomputers are perfectly suited to deliver answers to these problems in a realistic amount of time.”

KLA-Tencor Corporation (NASDAQ: KLAC) has been recognized by Intel as a recipient of a 2017 Preferred Quality Supplier (PQS) award. The PQS award recognizes companies like KLA-Tencor that Intel believes have relentlessly pursued excellence and conducted business with resolute professionalism.

“The dynamic nature of our business necessitates continuous improvement and an unrelenting focus on quality,” said Jacklyn Sturm, Vice President of Technology and Manufacturing Group and General Manager of Global Supply Management at Intel. “As Intel transitions to become a more data centric company, our award winning suppliers are embracing the most difficult challenges with rapid innovation and bold strategies.”

To qualify for PQS status, suppliers must exceed high expectations and uncompromising performance goals while scoring at least 80 percent on an integrated report card that assesses performance throughout the year. Suppliers must also achieve 80 percent or greater on a challenging continuous improvement plan and demonstrate solid quality and business systems.